Tom Homan went on CNN Sunday and said something so obvious it almost doesn’t deserve a headline, except that it’s coming from the border czar himself about one of his own agents. When asked about David Brouillette, the ICE officer who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, Homan responded that if the reporting on Brouillette’s history is accurate, “I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.” Gee, ya think?
We’re talking about a guy whose own ex-wife says he threw boiling water on her while she was holding their infant, whose second ex-wife filed protective orders describing him tackling his teenage daughter, and who by his own family’s account was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder as a child and told to go off his medication for a year so the Army would take him.
None of that is a secret anymore. It wasn’t a secret to the people who knew him before ICE handed him a badge and a gun, either. But that’s the bargain DHS made when it decided to staff its enforcement army as fast as humanly possible. Throw open the gates, dangle a signing bonus and a gun, and worry about who’s actually walking through them later. Later, apparently, means after somebody’s already dead.
Homan says the vetting is “under review” now, along with the training, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like accountability until you notice it’s entirely retrospective. Nobody reviewed anything before Brouillette was cleared to carry a firearm and make traffic stops on behalf of the federal government. They’re reviewing it now because a man is dead, and his name made national news. That’s not oversight; that’s damage control.
But wait, there’s more.
Then there’s the new directive out of acting ICE director David Venturella’s office, which apparently amounts to officers now needing at least one body camera running during vehicle stops. One. Just the one.
I’d love to know who sat in a room and decided that a single camera on a single officer, during a stop that can involve multiple agents converging on a vehicle from multiple angles, constitutes adequate documentation of anything.
Cameras get pointed the wrong way. Cameras get knocked loose in a scuffle. Cameras have a funny habit, across departments and decades of policing history, of malfunctioning or getting switched off at precisely the moments that later turn out to matter most.
Neither Guerrero’s shooting nor Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s shooting in Houston had any camera footage of the actual moment the trigger got pulled, which is presumably why this directive exists at all. Forgive me if I don’t feel especially reassured that the fix for “we had zero cameras” is “now you’ll have exactly one,” positioned wherever the agent happens to be standing.
As for Brouillette himself, he’s under internal investigation, which in this administration’s recent track record has meant roughly what it always means. The agency polices itself, on its own timeline, using its own definitions of wrongdoing, and reports back to the public only what it decides the public needs to hear.
We already know how that story tends to end. Lawmakers were told last week that ICE has fielded 56 complaints of excessive force, 32 cleared, and one referred for discipline, with zero actual discipline handed out so far.
That’s not a system straining under the weight of holding people accountable. That’s a system that has, so far, found a way not to. I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong on Brouillette. I’m not holding my breath.
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